Lorena Carrington

Lorena Carrington is a photographic artist and illustrator. Her current long term project brings to light the lost brave girls of Fairy Tales. Her photographic technique uses montage and silhouetted elements such as twigs, leaves, bones, animals and human figures.

Catalogue statement by Lorena

She had looked down, on the awkward step from platform to carriage, into the gap that dropped away from her into darkness. It looked so still and cool below the platform’s fluorescently lit metal and concrete and tired babies in prams, ice cream wrappers and mysterious speckled stains. But soon that dark would shift. The train’s underbelly, black and sticky with grease, would strain into movement, and the low slow sun would flick in through the thistles and gorse along the side of the track. She found a seat against the window, and leaned her head against the glass, letting the vibration of the engine rattle her a little. Maybe it would help to settle the shifting sands in her head. She was expected; would be welcomed with the usual hugs and we-missed you drawings of herself, outspread stick figure arms, triangle dress and always a big red smile under the scribbled line of light blue sky, but somehow she found herself surprised to have stepped onto that evening train home.

A tired body dropping into the seat beside her brought her back from her strange reverie, and she stared, chin in hand as the train slid past graffitied fences and neglected swing sets, lonely in patchy backyards. As the train picked up speed and the houses swirled away, she let her eyes venture between the houses, touching on split-second points of focus as they flung past. Fences, bridges, the up and down sway of power lines, naked trees all span into each other, and in their dance coalesced into vortices, pin sharp at their centre and whirling out into blurs of green and blue.

By the time her station slid in, the day had unraveled and spun out into the darkening suburbs beyond. She jostled past glowing touch-screens avoiding prickly late afternoon commuters, and stepped back over the gap onto a platform, this time littered with leaves and an empty paper cup reeling across her path. She hopped furtively from the end of the
platform and onto the dirt path that ran alongside the tracks. Now she twisted out of reach of spiny thistles. She was far enough down the track for the train to have gained speed into the red-lipped twilight as it wolf-whistled past her. In her move from passenger to bystander, her perspective had spun a half circle. Through one swirling window stood a single focused man, alone amongst the mass of commuters, a single point in all that spiralled around him. Then he was gone, and the train too, now just a broken strip of light receding through the trees and an eddying wind at her feet.

She walked on, away from the straight tracks as the path curved up the hill towards home, where the light from the windows would be warm, and all sat still in the dark blue night.